1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image coding method and an image coding apparatus for coding pictures.
2. Background Art
An interlaced sequence consists of two pictures captured and scanned at different times. The odd pixel rows of images are captured at a time different from the even pixel rows of images.
Most coding standards, e.g. MPEG-2 standard, MPEG-4 AVC standard, etc allow a picture coding structure of frame or field for coding of interlaced images. In some cases, it has been shown in prior art that frame-only coding may be better suited for some segments of the video, while other segments favor field-only coding.
Frame and field coding tools are described in NPL 1 and NPL 2. Adaptive methods for selecting picture level coding modes are not described in those two references.